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Heya, after a long hiatus both from ethnobotanical gardening and the forums, and a bit of readjustment in my life, it is time to start rebuilding the collection. I have a handful spore prints to trade. Psilocybe Subaerugniosa. And some Agaricus Bisporus prints, also wild. The print P. Sub was taken in 2014 in South Australia, If I remember correctly. I know its nothing special what I am offering, but hoping a generous person will be willing to share something from their collection with a little more viability than my prints may have.
Just a warning, that although these spores have been in generally dark cool places for the past years, I have moved house twice and variables have changed at times so... Just sayin they may not be the most viable or cleanest. DESPITE that i have not opened them since their creation.
Hope to see some replies soon, thanks everyone!

Any ideas on the ID for this impressive specimen? Could it be in the gymnopilus genus? This is the second flush that have come from this spot in the past month. As can seen in the photo, it is growing from the base of a gum tree. Location is Hunter Valley NSW. Cheers!
edit: it has gills of a yellow colour similar to the flesh.

Exhibition From Botanical Illustrations to Research: Watercolours from the University of Melbourne Herbarium.
27 March to 28 June 2015
Plus some great looking Fungi lectures. All on Tuesdays for those of you who have the time.
http://library.unimelb.edu.au/botanicalillustrations
Thanks to Torsten for posting on the Facebook site.

How Scavenging Fungi Became a Plant’s Best Friend
Glomeromycota is an ancient lineage of fungi that has a symbiotic relationship with roots that goes back nearly 420 million years to the earliest plants. More than two thirds of the world’s plants depend on this soil-dwelling symbiotic fungus to survive, including critical agricultural crops such as wheat, cassava, and rice. The analysis of the Rhizophagus irregularis genome has revealed that this asexual fungus doesn’t shuffle its genes the way researchers expected. Moreover, rather than having lost much of its metabolic genes, as observed in many mutualistic organisms, it has expanded its range of cell-to-cell communication genes and phosphorus-capturing genes.
Image: Spores and hyphae (root-like extensions) of an AMF, R. irregularis,
grown among carrot hairy roots. Photo by Guillaume Bécard (University of Toulouse).
A team led by the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and including researchers from the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) reported the complete genome of R. irregularis (formerly Glomus intraradices) in a paper published online November 25 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS http://bit.ly/PNAS-Glomus). The fungus is a member of the Glomeromycota family and frequently colonizes many plants important to agriculture and forestry. Glomeromycota, also called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), play a vital role in how phosphorus and carbon cycles through the atmosphere and land-based ecosystems, but exactly how it does this vital job is poorly understood.
“This is the first sequenced genome of arbuscular mycorrhizae, the type that is dominant on the planet,” said Igor Grigoriev, one of the senior authors on the paper and lead for the Fungal Genomics Program at the DOE JGI.
It was a long hard road to a sequenced arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus. In 2006, shortly after the DOE JGI sequenced the first tree genome, Populus trichocarpa, it became apparent that it takes a village (of other organisms) to raise a poplar tree. Researchers Jerry Tuskan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Francis Martin of INRA, recommended that the assembly of Populus-associated fungi and bacteria be sequenced to inform research on perennial plant growth, ecosystem function and plant microbe interactions. This long passage is outlined in an earlier publication in New Phytologist (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2008.02671.x/full). Rhizophagus irregularis, is the next in this linage to be released by the DOE JGI, it follows the ectomycorrhizal fungal symbiont Laccaria, the poplar rust pathogen Melampsora, and dozens of bacterial genomes.
A relic of fungal evolution, AMF diverged early on from other forms of fungus. They form dense clusters of branched structures -- called arbuscules -- in root cells, much like a tight, many-fingered handhold. The arbuscules are the main route of nutrient exchange between plants and fungi. Unable to live on their own, AMF are entirely dependent on their plant hosts for the sugars they need for food. They have carefully established their relationship with host plants, keeping them alive while sapping nutrients from them.
But AMF are also adept at capturing phosphorus from the soil and making it available for their hosts. Phosphorus, a critical element for cellular function, is otherwise difficult to extract from the soil and is often the limiting factor for how quickly a plant grows.
Scientists theorize that the benefits these fungi provided enabled ancient plants to evolve during the Paleozoic era, about 250 to 500 million years ago. Over time, plants adapted their essentially rootless primordial form and developed deeper and stronger roots to take advantage of the nutrients that underground AMF fed them. In exchange, plants provided nutrients the fungi couldn’t obtain themselves.
Analysis of the R. irregularis genome also revealed several surprising details. The research team found that the genome is among the largest fungal genomes sequenced, weighing in at 153 million base pairs (Mb). For comparison, the button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus), also sequenced and published by the DOE JGI, has a genome of about 30 Mb. Through several generations, portions of R. irregularis’s genome were duplicated, invaded by repeated transposable elements, famously known as ‘jumping genes’. Unlike many other fungi, R. irregularis seems to lack mechanisms that can keep these transposable elements from running amok.
“Among the expanded portions of its genome, R. irregularis had several genes for phosphorus metabolism, which are probably responsible for its large appetite for phosphorus,” said Francis Martin, one of the senior authors on the paper and lead for the Cluster of Excellence, Advanced Research on the Biology of Tree and Forest Ecosystems (ARBRE) at the INRA (http://mycor.nancy.inra.fr/ARBRE/). “They also have an abundance of genes for communication between cells via signaling proteins, including small secreted effectors highly expressed during symbiosis. Plant roots send out a plethora of chemical signals and these genes probably help AMF interact with plants, picking up the signals plants pump out.”
Another surprise for the research team was in the genes that govern metabolism. “Obligate parasites often have broken metabolism, missing some genes in critical metabolic pathway which make them dependent on their host,” Grigoriev said. “We did not find such genes here.” R. irregularis has retained much of its metabolic machinery, unlike many other obligate parasitic organisms. It leads a double-life, extracting minerals from the soil while still living in harmony with its host plant.
Though it has nearly 30,000 protein-encoding genes, R. irregularis has also lost hundreds of genes as a result of its close association with plants. For example, it can’t make most of the toxins other plant-interacting fungi release, probably, the researchers speculate, to avoid setting off the host plant’s immune system. It has also cast off most of its genes for breaking down plant cell walls, a critical ability for free-living fungi that feed off dead organic matter in soils.
Teasing apart the complex relationship between soil fungi and plants is likely to have an impact on improving biofuel production from plant biomass. “Through analysis of this and other mycorrhizal genomes, we can help to better understand interactions and conditions critical for a sustainable growth of bioenergy plants, but also staple crops, a prerequisite to help feeding the world,” said Martin.
Learn more from researchers Grigoriev, Martin and other collaborators on the importance of fungal genomics in this video: http://bit.ly/JGI-Fungal-vid
Source.

Fungus and Microbiomes better than GM for increasing crop yields, cold, heat, salt and drought resistance
New Scientist - researchers sprayed spores from the endophytes (fungi) from Dichanthelium lanuginosum and sprayed them onto wheat seeds, which normally grow at temperatures up to 38 °C. With the spores, the wheat could grow at 70 °C and needed up to 50 per cent less water than normal.
Different microbiomes can confer a range of superpowers to a number of crops. Rodriguez's group have also isolated endophytes from a salt-loving dunegrass (Leymus mollis), and a strawberry plant (Fragaria vesca) that grows at high altitude at temperatures as low as 5 °C. Rice plants that had been sprayed with the fungi became able to tolerate salt and cold, respectively. They also grew five times larger and needed half the water of normal plants The results were immediate: within 24 hours of being sprayed, the seeds began sprouting a greater number of longer roots than untreated seeds, and the team found that they expressed genes involved in stress-resistance and drought-tolerance. That suggests endophytes could help crops cope with droughts like the one afflicting the US. Rodriguez thinks the fungi are jump-starting the plants' metabolism, although the exact mechanism is still unclear. "The plant has the ability to do all this, it just can't get its act together without the fungi," he says. While attempts to genetically engineer plants to become drought-tolerant involve switching on metabolic pathways one at a time - a costly, drawn-out process - the fungi appear to activate them all in one go. "Nature's figured it out, we haven't," says Jerry Barrow, now retired from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Regina Redman, Rodriguez's collaborator and partner, has developed the spores as a powder that can coat any crop seed. The pair have started a company, Symbiogenics, which is carrying out field trials on rice sprayed with the fungus Trichoderma, isolated from dunegrass. The fungus allows the rice to grow at cold temperatures in salty environments; rising sea-levels due to climate change makes salt-tolerance a sought-after trait. Initial results show treated plants can yield 35 per cent more grain than untreated ones. A second field trial in corn is underway in Michigan, in the heart of the drought. Based on lab results, Rodriguez says they expect that the endophytes will lessen the amount of water the plant needs. What's more, lab tests suggest endophytes do not harm the plant in wet conditions, in contrast to drought-tolerant GM plants, which tend to grow poorly when the weather turns. Barrow and Mary Lucero, also at New Mexico State University, have transferred endophytic fungi and bacteria from the drought-tolerant desert plants Atriplex canescens and Bouteloua eriopoda into tomatoes, chillies and grasses that would serve as feedstock for cattle. They found that yields increased in all three crops (USDA Forest Service Proceedings, 2008, p 83). Rather than isolating individual species of fungi, Lucero believes it might be more effective to harness the whole microbial community by mulching up drought-tolerant plants' roots and growing crops in them. "We don't really know how many microbes are in there; we're looking at one little snapshot," she says. The crosstalk between the different species of microbe might be as important as that between the microbes and the plants, she adds. Either way, transferring plant microbiomes might be a fast way to meet the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's goal to double global food production by 2050. With droughts such as the one affecting the US expected to become more frequent over coming decades, plant biologists aren't hopeful that they can meet this goal through genetic engineering. "Biotechs can't work fast enough to meet the pressures of 7 billion people and climate change," says Lucero. "To meet food demands, we need to adapt quickly. Microbial communities have always adapted quickly.

was reading the news on my phone when i came along this article about the yarsagumba fungus. Thought some may find this interesting. I would be curious to see its efficacy. Sounds kind of gross though the way it is "born" but i guess magics grow in turd and people eat them(rebels)
http://bigpondnews.com/articles/OddSpot/2012/08/01/Rare_fungus_enhance_sexual_prowess_778122.html

Can anyone recommend a tech for stopping cuttings in a sealed warm humid environment
From contracting fungi?
I usually don't have a problem with this, but recently had to set up indoors and there is carpeting.
I have come to view carpeting as a disgusting dishrag that just hold fungus and germs for years on end..

I am about to repot some different Acacias and I started wondering about the symbiotic fungi it grows with in the wild.. the ones I am about to repot are acuminata, cyclops and floribunda and I have a bunch of random others coming along.
So I am not sure if all species are supposed to benefit from this fungus, if it is different fungus(or fungi) for different species, where to get it or how much to use.
From what I can gather, these may be the relevant fungi:
Scutellospora calospora
Glomus intraradices
Glomus mosseae
and they may benefit a range of Australian natives?
so basically I am wondering does anyone in WA have a chunk of the right kind of mycelium for this in some dirt?
and don't tell me to go scratching in the dirt to get some, unless it just grows everywhere under any random natives (does it?).
Is it best to add it when repotting, or can I go ahead and repot and then just dig some in the soil when I get it?
Any help or advice welcomed about the repotting generally, so far I am doing it moist and with some seasol
Thanks